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TechCruncher sues former pad partner

Legal JooJoo juju

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The ongoing saga of the CrunchPadJooJoo couch-potato media pad took another sharp turn Thursday when TechCrunch blogmeister, beer-can recycler, and self-reported CrunchPad JooJoo papa Michael Arrington filed suit against his former partners at Fusion Garage.

As a Friday blog post by Arrington makes clear, he remains as "ripshit mad" as he was when news of the then-CrunchPad's supposed launch date was leaked to Singapore's Straits Times in July.

The lawsuit comes on the heels of news late last month that the alleged CrunchPad had allegedly died an alleged death at the hands of Fusion Garage - only to be revived by the Garage band as the JooJoo.

When announcing the demise of the CrunchPad, Arrington said: "We will almost certainly be filing multiple lawsuits against Fusion Garage."

And now one of those possible multiples has been filed in US District Court in Northern California. In the highly detailed and profusely exhibit-laden filing, Arrington accuses Fusion Garage of all sorts of nastiness, including breach of fiduciary duty, misappropriation of business ideas, fraud, deceit, and unfair competition.

After stating that TechCrunch "holds an esteemed position in the technology world" and informing the court that "TIME magazine named [Arrington] one of the '100 most influential people in the world' in 2008," the suit goes on to cite "Fusion Garage's financial straits," describe how Fusion Garage's founder Chandrasekar Rathakrishnan "tried to wheedle a better deal" in merger talks, and how TechCrunch was "frustrated with delays and communication problems" with Fusion Garage.

"From the very start of their joint venture," the court filing reads, "Fusion Garage engaged in serial misrepresentations to TechCrunch" and that those misrepresentations continued "even while Fusion Garage implemented its plan to steal the CrunchPad from under TechCrunch's nose."

The suit was filed on Thursday afternoon, and on Friday Arrington took the gloves off in his blog post, indulging himself in a bit of borderline-intemperate huffing and puffing.

Arrington (or one of his allies) also vented at his former child, the CrunchPad JooJoo. A comment - which has since been deleted - on Rathakrishnan's CrunchBase profile referred to the Singaporean entrepreneur's involvement with the "soon-to-be failure of a tablet named the JooJoo."

Arrington apparently calmed down enough to see that prediction deleted, but the lawsuit lives on. You can read the full text of it here. ®